Dave Thune, who can see Europe from his porch in Irvine Park, says that we must look across the ocean to see the merits of streetcars in St. Paul. On the evening the City Council voted 6-0 to approve a resolution pursuing a network of seven potential streetcar routes, Thune said, "I am intrigued by this notion of doing streetcar,'' making it sound no more expensive than doing lunch at Cossetta.

Thune then inconceivably linked St. Paul to the cities of Europe, noting that "if you look across the ocean, every major city is doing some sort of mass transit.''

Where to begin? Well, we are already doing more than some sort of mass transit. We have a new Green Line, for example. It runs faithfully up and down University Avenue with mostly empty carriages. I check every day. I note the trains at the European-sounding Westgate Station, just west of University Avenue and Minnesota 280. You could a play a game of Wiffle Ball in most of those cars and you wouldn't even foul a ball off anybody reading a newspaper.

As for the cities of Europe, they grew up that way, naturally dense and inhospitable to the automobile. Those cities are ancient. We are brand new. Every time they dig up ground for a new parking lot in London they find more Roman ruins. Every time we dig up ground we find abandoned streetcar tracks from the 1950s. We have horsepower. They have streets about the width of a horse.

But Thune is quite possibly the first of his kind to at least admit what our new urban visionaries have in mind. These people are actually playing Europe. It has always been thus. The Green Line planners played Europe. They played Europe with the Hiawatha Line, and now they want to play Europe with streetcars, which they apparently believe will delude them into thinking that just around the next bend is Trafalgar Square or the Eiffel Tower.

Public transportation -- subways, trains, streetcars -- make brilliant sense where it makes brilliant sense. It makes sense precisely in the crowded cities of Europe, and, yes, in New York and Chicago, which are crowded and unaccommodating of the automobile.

But here, in St. Paul, or more accurately, the metropolitan area? We are spread out. Like the rest of America we took eagerly to Henry Ford's great breakthrough, and we began to expand and have our own places with our own picket fences. We were new! We had a blank canvas!

Ah, but the progressives find this disagreeable and believe that our appetites are too voracious, or that we are too exploitive of the land or that we use too many natural resources or that we are wasteful. Why, if we could only be like Europe ...

Russ Stark sponsored the streetcar resolution. He should really move to Europe. His main actions as a City Council member have been to build sidewalks and embrace cycling and pedestrian travel. He not only is anti-automobile, he has himself convinced that teenagers and 20-somethings are leading mostly car-free lifestyles.

Lifestyle is another identifying trigger point in understanding what is really going on here. The American lifestyle is big and brawny and smacks of having to achieve your worth. More ideal, to the minds of the collectivists, would be a lifestyle of modesty and quietude, a cafe society, not so much emphasis on actually carving out your own path but on sharing the path so that one of us or the other wouldn't get too far ahead of the person in the next train seat. We should all be the same.

Dan Bostrom left the chamber before the 6-0 vote, but not before he said that for the $250 million cost of the starter route from Arcade Street to Randolph, all 873 miles of paved streets in St. Paul, including the interstate highways within our borders, could be milled and overlayed with $48 million left over.

He was cheered.

It is what we should do. It's who we are, street people, going to our own places at our own direction. There is nothing wrong with that.